Interview: November's Young Creative of the Month

Interview: November’s Young Creative of the Month

Every month Brave Island runs a Young Creative of the Month fund, where we spotlight a local young creative with an interview on our blog, and support them with funding of £100. For November, it’s multi-disciplinary artist, Maia Allard-Willcocks. This fund launches at the beginning of every month, you can apply to be Young Creative of the Month for December here.

Please can you tell us about your creative practice?

I have always been drawing, filling sketchbooks, joining in art competitions and posting my art online. In recent years, especially due to studying art in GCSE, A-level and currently a foundation diploma, I’ve begun to hone my skills more and discover what I like creating the most as in the future I’d like to make a career from art. Some of my art is inspired by my favourite music or characters whether it be from a TV show, videogame or comic book – another side of my art focuses on horror and folklore. I take great inspiration from creatures and cryptids both local and from afar, notably creatures such as the wendigo, harpy and werewolf have all featured in my work.

Alongside this I take great interest in other classic horror monsters such as zombies which have been so intriguing to explore due to their history, visuals and what they represent. I explore these creatures and characters through many mediums such as oil, collage and watercolour however my favourites include ink, charcoal and gouache paint which allow for so much texture and layering to really bring depth to a piece. I’ve also recently been rediscovering digital art and creating a lot of animal focused illustrations which I’m working on turning into physical products.

Are there any projects or pieces you’ve created that you’re particularly proud of?

I’m quite proud of my A-level project in which I looked at the theme of ‘Distorted reality’. I think the transition between GCSE and A-level was really helpful in giving my art more personality and I experimented with so many new materials and methods I would’ve never used before. For example, I had never tried oil painting before but this project gave me a chance to try it on canvas for my final piece and although I wasn’t totally happy with the result, I learned a lot and now I’m currently working on an oil painting at home.

This project is also where I discovered my interest for folklore creatures, I studied artists and researched deeper meanings and symbolism within work to help tell stories as well as the visual aspects themselves like composition and colour. From all my research I created many works such as a comic page, paintings, charcoal illustration, etchings, animations, ink illustrations and more which were almost all out of my comfort zone and helped me develop better skills.

What would be your dream project/collaboration?

A dream project would be to work with some of my favourite companies for concept and illustration work. In the future I’d like to become a concept artist/illustrator for media (e.g. movies/videogames/animation/comics) as it means I get to create designs of characters, locations and objects that will later appear in such media. The opportunity to design characters and bring in history, symbolism and meaning to their designs would be so interesting. Silent Hill is one of my favourite franchises that utilizes this – the monster designs and how they connect to the characters and story through their visual appearance is so intriguing and visually inspired a lot of my work especially due to studying concept artist Masahiro Ito for my early GCSE project.